Academic Center Offers Peer Review, Face to Face

The economist Deirdre McCloskey said a workshop on her most recent book-in-progress was “better than peer review because it’s a real conversation.”

By Jennifer Howard

Fairfax, Va.

Academic authors, imagine a roomful of expert readers, prepared
to spend days going through your draft opus, point by point. It’s a
writer’s dream—at least for a writer willing to take constructive
criticism from equals.

For the past decade or so, the Mercatus Center at George Mason
University has been making that dream a reality in a series of
manuscript-­review workshops. Designed for well-established
scholars in the later